This Ingenious Artificial Island Will Collect Wind Energy And Divert It to Shore

The winds of change are blowing towards renewable energy, and nations are becoming increasingly more creative in how they can capitalise on the growing trend.

At present, the most popular sources of renewable energy come from either solar or wind. Both, however, require tracts of land for their infrastructure. With real estate for wind farms becoming increasingly expensive and scarce, Dutch power grid and energy network operator TenneT wants to build wind turbines on the sea.

Well, not on water per se: rather, on shallow areas in a region in the North Sea called the Dogger Bank. Located some 125 km (78 miles) off the East Yorkshire coast, Dogger Bank is supposedly a windy enough site, allowing the company to optimise wind energy generation.

The Dogger Bank project is effectively what’s called an offshore wind farm, but what makes this project radical is the artificial island built in the middle.

This would serve as a hub for the vast offshore farm, expected to be even bigger in scale than the current largest windfarm in Gansu, China. TenneT expects the Dogger Bank project to be able to handle a capacity of 30GW.

The wind farm island hub would collect energy from the wind turbines through short cables.

Converters would then turn the electricity into direct current, so as not to lose power over the long distance travel towards the Netherlands and the United Kingdom, and later on perhaps even to Germany, Denmark, Belgium, and Norway.

The long-distance cables would also allow electricity to travel to whichever country needed it most at any given time. This setup makes sure that energy generation is consistent and cost-effective, and that nothing would be wasted.

“Is it difficult? In the Netherlands, when we see a piece of water we want to build islands or land. We’ve been doing that for centuries. That is not the biggest challenge,” van der Hage told The Guardian.

Building the artificial island and the hundreds of wind turbines for the project would be a burden shared by Tennet with offshore wind farm developers like Denmark’s Ørsted and Germany’s Innogy. Tennet would shoulder some $1.8 billion (€1.5 billion) to build the island.